if you enjoy eviscerating complete strangers and games like call of duty mobile and pubg then you might very well be interested in the fresh new red magic 5s it’s just started shipping these last couple of days for 579 us dollars from the global red magic website pack some really premium specs and some great gaming features for that reasonable asking price so what i’m going to do is take you on a full on tour of all the hardware and the software here on the red magic 5s and spend a lot of time gaming on this bad boy to see exactly whether it lives up to expectations and whether it’s actually worth your hard earned cash and from all the latest greatest tech please do poke subscribe and ding that notifications bell cheers i’ve got to say it’s great first impressions absolutely love what uh nubia is doing with this snazzy comic style design here on the packaging there’s the actual red magic i’ll just pop that aside check what’s in the rest of the box inside of the box not looking quite as exciting as the outside got to see it looks like basically you get your adapter plug your usb type c cable which to be fair gets top marks for being bright red you’ve got your bit quick start guide action and also it’s good to see a bundled condom case as well just in case your problems get a bit sweaty during all that frantic gaming action and you end up doing the worst and dropping the red magic 5s right so that’s all the bollocks in the box now let’s actually check out the red magic now the first thing that always amazes me when i pull a gaming smartphone out of the
box is the absolute weight of the thing this is a 220 gram monster so it does pack some proper heft what you’ve got is glass front and back with a nice bit of metal engine just to break it up sandwiched in between the two although that glass back and does actually have a lovely metallic style sheen to it as you can see there it is a matte finish so hopefully the lack of gloss means you won’t be covered in greasy scuffy horrible fingerprints this here is the sonic silver models definitely looks very sleek and shiny but you can also pick it in the rather eye poppingly in your face pulse coloration as well which frankly has to be seen to be believed gotta see it though i think this silver finish is rather smart it’s a bit more subtle a little bit more restrained compared with usual game and smartphone designer though it is kind of unmistakably a gamercentric handset with the you know the random x uh brandon the angular camera lens all these little bits of flare that you wouldn’t get on your typical handset and regardless of whether you get the silver model or that slightly bonkers pulse version you will of course get full rgb lighting on the back i will show you that when we actually get the phone turned on speaking of which let’s actually do that now assuming we’ve got some gas in the tank yes we do oh and immediately confronted with an enormous scroll and t’s and c screen that’s always a good start i’m just going to bunk my sim card inside and it looks like basically uh it’s a reversible dual sim tray so you can fit two sim cards in there at once but no space for any micro sd memory cards to expand the 128 or 256 gigs of onboard storage now that you’d expect from a gaming smartphone it is ufs 3.1 storage because it’s going to be handling a lot of really big files and as you can see i’ve actually got an in-display fingerprint sensor here on the red magic 5s as well so i’m just registering my print oh that screen is going really really bright although it is also annoyingly low down the display as well i always prefer when it’s a little bit further up it’s a bit more
comfortable to grow up for okay we are all set up here is the red magic 5s locked and loaded and ready for action as you can see here it’s actually quite a nice stock version of android that you get as with previous nubia gaming smartphones as well which i really really like you don’t have that really thick heavy overlay which just like throws the game and stuff in your face straight away because as you’d hope and expect it it’s full on android 10 on here so you’ve got all those great features like the dark mode which comes enabled by default you’ve got the gesture navigation and everything too which i’m actually trying to hunt down now let’s forget how uh very feature packed these menus are there you go there’s the wii bugger bit of full screen gesture action it’s got plenty of other features you can play around with like it’s been always on display which you can set let’s get a bit of the time on the go let’s do that one that’ll do nicely when it comes to actually unlocking the smartphone as well of course you’ve got that uh in display fingerprint sensor which you just give a quick tap and as you can see straight into your desktops otherwise you also have a bit of face recognition on here as well so let’s just try that out boom super swift even faster than the fingerprint sensor and of course you’ve got a bunch of gaming features as well which we’ll touch on in a bit so for the visuals here what you’ve got is a 6.65 inch amoled display boss and a full hd plus resolution that’s 2340 by 1080 so you can pick up on those finer details
there certainly won’t be any sneaky little creeping around in the bushes right in front of you you’ll be able to spot them and pop them right in the goddamn face those colors actually look quite realistic on the default settings so it’s quite handy if you are going to be editing photos something like that on the side as well you can boost up the vibrance so you can also change the color temperature things like that if you want as you can see there is actually an srgb modes again great for those creative moments the flat design of the display is of course no surprise for a gaming device it’s really really well suited for gaming on the go you don’t have any of those uh controls sort of sloping off the edges of the screen like you do on some of the more premium flagship phones that aren’t gamercentric and of course like most gaming smartphones you do have a impressive bit of refresh rate action here it’s actually on 90hz refresh rate by default it’s nice and silky smooth but can dynamically change between 1960 has depend on what you’re actually doing to preserve battery life if it’s not really needed you can actually scale it all the way up to 144 hertz as well again it’ll be a dynamic refresh rate if you don’t really care about the battery life if you just want insane smoothness if you can see up there as well in the status bar it’ll actually tell you which refresh rate you are currently set at which is quite handy in case you bump it up all down and then forget about it the screen certainly seems bright enough on that maximum level as well it’s around
600 nits that it hits so you’ll definitely be able to see what’s going on even when you’re gaming outside as long as you’re not in like direct super crazy sunlight which frankly here in the uk is quite unlikely anytime soon and the good news is well if you want to do away with controllers and just use the touch controls is that you get a 240 hertz touch sampling rate so basically every poken swipe will immediately register here on the red magic 5s i’m also definitely a fan of the dual stereo speaker set up here on the red magic 5s with the dtsx ultra support as well so that can help give you that stereo effect that you need when you’re gaming even if you’re not using a pair of headphones of course i do always recommend gaming with a pair of headphones and you don’t actually have a headphone jack built here in the top of the red magic 5s otherwise you’ve got full bluetooth 5.1 support and this is a bit of a question for you guys there’s something here in the audio settings called elephant voice denoise which i’ve got i mean that’s a new one on me i got no idea what that even means so if you do know definitely slap that down in the comments below please and sort of educate me on that and see it’s the end of a very stressful day you’re ready to start murdering people online what you’ll need to do is find this little red switch here on the left edge it does stand out quite a way with that lovely coloration just push that upwards and what you’ll do is enter the red magic gaming ui this gives you fast access to all of your favorite mobile titles that you have installed and if you flick from the right edge of the screen like so you’ll open up a fresh new menu with loads of gaming related features and that meant you can actually be dragged out at any point while you’re gaming alike so if you want to fast access any of those features on the fly definitely very handy indeed now amongst these gaming features is a performance boost at all but that’s not really needed here on the red magic
5s thankfully because what you got is the snapdragon 865 chipset backed by either 8 or 12 gigs of ram i’ve got the more basic eight gigabyte model so during all of my gaming sessions i basically didn’t touch that game enhancement tool i just left it on the auto mode so you do have the likes the gpu turbo the cpu turbo or the super performance if you really want them and sure enough that snapdragon 865 chipset backed by eight gigs of ddr5 ram absolutely tore through pubg mobile and college early on those maximum detail settings at a dependable 60 frames per second basically never really fluctuating at all you’ve got a perfect frame rate at all times so you’ve got the edge over the competition and to keep the red magic 5s from getting too toasty you’ve got the trinity coolant system this is a combination of your traditional liquid coolant plus an actual built-in fan made from aircraft grid aluminium alloy just like previous models of red magic when this fan is in action it does make a bit of noise but it’s certainly nothing offensive nothing like the jumbo jet taking off gales churned out by gaming laptops and when i left the coolant tech to get on with its job it did the trick game bench recorded battery temperatures leveling off around the sort of 35 to 36 degree mark while the back of the handset only got slightly warm to the touch even after a couple of hours of non-stop gameplay and if you really want to you can even buy the optional eye stock which slaps onto the arse end of the red magic 5s and basically adds another whopping great fan to it if you’re just using the red magic 5s as you’re kicking about a standard not really necessary but if you’re going to be doing a lot of gaming
with the phone plugged in then it is actually really good not only will it help to keep the battery and everything cool while you’re gaming and charging at the same time but also it moves that charging port to the back end of the device that means you’ve got cables trailing out the side of the phone which will then get in the way of your hands and make gaming really awkward on the edge of the red magic 5s you’ve also got two built-in shoulder trigger buttons as well with a 320 h touch sampling rate so there’s no delay at all you can mount these to any on-screen controls and i found them absolutely invaluable in the likes of pubg and in call of duty of course as well if you’re not going to be using the gamepad you’ve also got some proper haptic feedback with them so you get some proper rumble every time you use them really good there’s also a 4d shock haptic feedback option for pubg and a couple of other titles as well which gives you an extra bit of rumble again when you’re using those on screen controls and as usual yes you do have the obligatory rgb lighting on the ascent of the red magic 5s just like every other game and smartphone basically but at least it’s once again pretty subtle just like the rest of the design you do have limited control unfortunately over this led so if you’re hoping to get it to flash all kinds of different colors and in pretty patterns then you’re basically out of luck what you’ve got is either having it on full time otherwise having it breathe like so now nubia has stuffed a 4 500 milliamp battery inside of the
red magic 5s which sounds pretty good but it is actually smaller than a lot of other gaming smartphones out there especially when you get into the likes of the rogue phone i found that a full charge would give me just under four hours of non-stop gaming on the likes of pubg or call of duty with all of those settings turned to max including a good bit of 144 hertz screen refresh action and the red magic 5s charges at a rather poultry 18 watts if you just use the bundle charger but apparently it’s capable of up to 55 watt charging if you spunk up a bit of extra cash for the optional fast charger and as for your connectivity you’ve got a good bit of wi-fi six on board here as well as full 5g support as well so basically you’re covered if you want to do a good bit of online gaming wherever you roam now let’s finish up with a quick squint at that camera tech and what you get slapped on the back here is a triple n setup it’s a 64 megapixel primary lens using sony’s imx 686 sensor you’ve also got an 8 megapixel ultra wide angle lens and a 2 megapixel macro lens so when you’re not killing strangers online and teabagging their twitch and corpses you can take lovely close-up pics of daffodils and frankly the number of camera modes and different features packed into this thing is absolutely insane you’ve got your standard photo mode of course you’ve also got your pro photo mods you’ve got full control over basically absolutely everything you could possibly want this is dedicated night mode which basically takes lots of different shots of different exposures and then melds them all together and of course you’ve
got the obligatory portrait mode which just adds a nice bit of a bokeh style background effect to really help your subject stand out if you want to shoot video the good news is you can capture those whole movies at up to ultra hd 4k level at 60 frames per second which is great to see and you’ve also got a whole bunch of bonus camera modes slapped on here as well just too many to even fathom frankly and so far from a quick play gotta say really liking the results from this red magic 5s not too surprising given the imax 686 sensor slapped on there but of course the software usually plays a big part in image quality as well but yeah looking good even with something you know fairly strong contrast and everything get some nice details packed in there some nice realistic looking tones and colors and while that primary lens shoots in 16 megapixel resolution by default you can actually bump it up to 64 if you want that full finer detail and if you want to take a selfie shoot yourself uh doing a bit of commentary on some games something like that you’ve got an eight megapixel front facing camera as well so it’s all fairly big but hopefully should do the job nicely when needed and right there in a nutshell is the red magic 5s so it’s not the most fully featured gaming smartphone out there not the one packing the super best performance or battery life but you know what for value for money definitely right up there and it will satisfy anyone who wants to do a good bit call of duty pub g anything like that on the move but what do you think be gritty your thoughts down in the comments below and please do poke subscribe and ding that notifications bell for more on the latest and greatest tech cheers everyone love you
